Tag: local seo

The increasing importance of local SEO for small-to-medium sized businesses cannot be overlooked. Even for small businesses in moderately competitive geographic markets, certain factors citations, backlinks, on-page SEO, competitive analysis and rank tracking all need to be incorporated into a local SEO campaign.

For instance, one important component like citation building and auditing is vital to ensure consistency and eliminate any redundancy or duplication. In today’s competitive landscape with the local 3-pack now the most coveted advertising space for SMBs, success with local SEO hinges on properly optimized citations surrounding your business. But that is just one example.

The local 3-pack is the most valuable form of marketing and advertising for certain businesses that operate on the local level.

Local search rivalry is also fierce and surface-level research to determine your competition before entering your niche or market is not enough. In-depth competitive analysis allows you to pull comprehensive competitor data, which lend insights and opportunities. Certain tool can determine your competitors’ rankings for specific keywords, which can provide new keyword opportunities.

Further, with competitive analysis and link auditing tools, you can pinpoint new opportunities to generate backlinks dovetailing on some of your competitors backlink profiles. Combined with rank tracking, you can better monitor and receive critical alerts on your business’s local ranking.

Our Top 3 Local SEO Tools

To effectively address these vital components to local SEO, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite tools to get the job done. Each of these local SEO tools has its own unique features and functionality. It is therefore important to match the features to what weaknesses you have in your local SEO efforts.

BrightLocal

As one of the most effective citation services for SMBs and local SEO agencies alike, BrightLocal is used by over 1,000 SEO-related agencies. The staff members handle over 60,000 monthly citation submissions. What’s unique about BrightLocal is that they do both manual citation building, as well as direct-to-site submissions and automated distribution using data aggregators.

The CitationBurst tool makes building and correcting citations a breeze.

Here, as a user, you will enjoy flexibility. Users also pick which sites to be updated for them. The manual submission service is available in countries such as US, UK, Canada, and Australia among others.

BrightLocal charges about $2-$3 and $55 annually per listing for manual and aggregator submissions, respectively. The latter comes with free one-year updates. In addition, you select both the number of sites as well as the sites themselves. The guarantee is that 7 in 10 submissions will go live within a month of submission.

Moz Local

This local SEO platform-meets-service focuses on using Aggregators to distribute data. With this you can update and/or submit your listing details directly to the main 4 aggregators, including 5 directories.

Run your listing audit using this service and determine your listing’s locations as well as the completeness of citation data. Your listing CSV data can be uploaded and submitted to this service’s network for a fee of $84 a year.

Audit listings and citations with ease using one of many tools provided by Moz Local.

Moz Local is Google My Business-compatible, allowing you to pull your data from within and push your data updates as well. Moz Local also submits to the four main aggregators and presents an excellent audit tool for viewing duplicates and existing listing completeness.

Update and re-verify your listings at any given time. However, aggregator distribution might experience delays, causing listings to go live a little slower. The white-label reporting option is also lacking.

Raven Tools

With automated marketing reports, Raven Tools saves on time. Is also allows you to create comprehensive SEO and PPC marketing reports fast and schedule them for quarterly, monthly, or weekly submission.

Perhaps the most dangerous SEO tool in the Raven Tool suite, is the Site Auditor. This can automatically crawl your site or any other domain and gather key data on technical and on-page SEO elements (i.e. length of or missing titles and meta data.) Moreover, it also supports Google’s latest requirements, including mobile UX and page speed.

Local SEO is one of the most powerful marketing mediums for local business. However, many business owners and marketing professional are unsure where to begin with implementing SEO.

These local SEO tips will work for just about any business that want to boost its visibility with local search results. These are the listings for which Google lists three local businesses and a map above the organic search results (commonly known as the the Google 3-pack in the SEO community).

Depending on how your website is set up, and your business, you might not be able to implement all of these tips, but implementing just 70 percent of them is enough for most local businesses to rank high in local search results. Let’s jump right in.

1. Create and verify your Google+ Local page

Once you create your Google+ Local page, you need to verify your address (by entering your area pin code), email address (by clicking on email link sent to you), and website (by linking Google+ local page with your site).

2. Have a mailing address in city or town that you are targeting

Without an address, it would be difficult for you to rank in local search results for that particular location. However, you can still rank for normal search results for your localized keywords that are normally displayed right below local business listings.

3. Decide the website page you want to list on your Google+ local page

Assess whether your newly created page, your homepage, or another page on your site (about us, contact, services, etc), is most relevant, in terms on on-site optimization (header tag, title tag, content, etc), to effectively list on your Google+ Local page.

4. Fully complete your Google+ Local page

Write a short (80-100 words) description of your business to populate your Google+ page. It should also include your keywords and services. Provide opening hours, contact details and upload at least one video and five photos.

5. Choose suitable categories on your Google+ Local page

You need to choose proper categories that accurately describe your business for long term SEO success. You also need to ensure your category choices state all about your business (e.g. cosmetic dentist, electrician, dental clinic, etc), rather than products you sell or services you provide.

6. Be consistent with your company name, address and phone number

Make sure that your business name, address and phone numbers are listed on Google+ Local page and they exactly match with the name, address and phone numbers listed on a specific page of your website. You also need to list your local phone number (with its area code and city you are planning to target, on specific page of your website and your Google+ page.)

7. Make it super easy for people to find and/or contact you

You should put your website phone number, address and email address in a prominent position on each page of your site. Also add a contact form to your website’s footer or sidebar to ensure proper local SEO.

8. Include your keyword and location on your website landing page

Include primary keyword and location that you want to rank for in your header tag, title, and written content on the specific page of your site listed on Google+ Local page.

9. Add a map of your location to your website

You can search for your business address on Google Maps. Now click on “link” button to get an embedded code for the map, and include that particular code on your website page that is listed on your Google+ Local page.

10. Create a separate website page for each location that you wish to target

If your business operates from multiple locations, you need to create one page on your site for each of them, and optimize (header tag, title tag, written content, etc) each of those pages specifically for just one location.

11. Optimize your website for multiple devices

You should optimize your website for various mobile devices such as laptops, desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Having a responsive web design that renders on all devices will impact your business’ web presence on Google mobile search. For information on mobile web design, click here.

12. Create separate page for each of your products or services

Create one page that effectively summarizes all your services or products and have a link to other pages that cover details of those products. Also write unique content for your website.

13. List your business on directories and third-party websites

List your business name, address, and phone number on authoritative and trustworthy websites. Ensure same phone number and address is listed each time. This will definitely boost your local SEO efforts.